Vendémiaire publishing house in Paris has issued a book by Oleg Voskoboynikov, Professor at the HSE School of History and Tenured Professor of HSE. The book is called ‘For centuries and centuries. Christian civilization of the Medieval West’ (Pour les siècles des siècles. Civilisation chrétienne de l'Occident médiéval. Paris, Vendémiaire, 2017).

One of the chapters in Springer’s newly released academic volume Transforming Education is co-authored by IOE education innovation researcher Diana Koroleva. Entitled Coup D’etat in the Panopticon: Social Networking in Education, the paper has been inspired by a series of seminars in philosophy Diana was attending on her doctoral track at the IOE Graduate School of Education.

From Ancient Manuscripts to ModernDictionaries: Perspectives on Linguistics and Ancient Languages

The article at hand aims to demonstrate the development of internationalloanword adaptation in Early Modern Hebrew based on Hebrew presspublished in Russia during the period from the 1860s to the 1910s. In theperiod, various languages from both Eastern and Western Europe wereenriched by internationalisms. For Hebrew, the challenge was even morecomplex, since in that same period Hebrew was undergoing languagemodernization that is referred to by various terms in scholarly use – reviv-al, revitalization, revernacularization, relexification and others. I intend toshow that most trends in the area of loanword adaptation had beenformed by the 1910s in European Hebrew. The image of language changethat is reflected by the sources I use contradicts both traditional and revi-sionist general theories on Israeli Hebrew emergence.

This paper examines the problematic concept of dead language as exemplified by the Hebrew language. The first section presents a brief history of the concept of dead language in European linguistic thought. Originating in Italy of the 15th century, the term became common in European linguistic writings during the 16th to 18th centuries as an epithet for Latin, Ancient Greek and Hebrew. During the Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment) in the 19th century it was adopted by Jewish intellectuals and was current in linguistic controversies throughout the 20th century. Sections 2 and 3 show the key role the label dead as applied to Hebrew played in wide-spread polemics on Jewish language choice in Russia during the first quarter of the 20th century (§ 2) and in the discourse about a Hebrew “revival” in Palestine at the same period (§ 3). Later works on the history of Hebrew published in the 19th and 20th centuries proposed novel conceptualizations but nevertheless followed the idea of the “deadness” of the Hebrew language of previous periods, discussed in § 4. Examples of Hebrew usage which contradict Hebrew’s functioning exclusively as a language of religion and high-level writings are provided in § 5. The last section is a humble attempt to outline a possible direction for a description of Hebrew language history, avoiding the problematic term dead language and other related terms.

In the present article two eleventh-century phrases inscribed many times on the walls of the St Sophia Cathedral in Novgorod (коуни рони and парехъ мари) are shown to be of Semitic provenance. The authors provide the linguistic arguments which support the claim of a Hebrew source for коуни рони and a Syriac one for парехъ мари. In addition, we offer a reconstruction of the historical pragmatic context in which the phrases can be situated. It is proposed that the коуни рони inscriptions can be connected with the seizure of Novgorod and the plundering of St Sophia by Vseslav of Polotsk in the year 1066. They should be regarded as the oldest tangible proof of contacts with Jews and Hebrew in Rus’. In the case of the парехъ мари inscriptions, the hypothesis is put forward that the author was a certain Efrem, a local citizen, possibly a clergyman, who was a Syrian by descent.

After more then 70 years since his death and nevertheless the crucial changes psychology has undergone meanwhile, L.S.Vygotsky is still considered a major and highly influencual figure. In what follows the author tries to understand the means and ways of he reception of Vygotsky’s heritage and the major role L.R.Luria performed in the process in question.